Do the funky laptop

[unfaithfulsfan]

got an eMachines M5305 *shudder* laptop that the cpu keeps overheating in. I reset and re-greased the chip which helped a little bit but it's still doing it about every hour. I ran diagnostics on the hard drive and it failed the short self-test. When I slaved it to my computer, it kept powering down then right back up again.

Would that cause the CPU to overheat? (BTW it's an AMD Athlon 2200. I checked the fan, also, it's a little dusty but functional)

Need to get past this so I can figure out what the customer did to the OS when his buddy who "knows something about computers" tried a repair install. Or whether it's related to the hdd.

Thanks,
Jack

[unfaithfulsfan]

OK, so it's not the hard drive although I still think there's something wrong with the drive as it won't read on my computer, in fact it locks my computer up. I put a shop notebook drive in and tried to install Windows on it, it shut down about halfway through loading the files.

What else could cause the CPU to overheat like this. I mean the heat sink gets friggin HOT!!!!! Bad CPU? All that's running are the bare essentials, video, RAM, CPU, HDD, and power.

The BIOS is very spartan No options to really do much of anything except change the boot order. Reading CPU at 1800 MHz. After 5 minutes in BIOS, it shut down

Jack

[DMB2000uk]

If you've cleaned as much as the dust off from the heatsink as possible, there isn't much else you can do to stop it overheating.

Just for kicks, grab a big deskfan and blast the underside of the laptop with it to see if it makes the laptop stay on for longer.

Dan

[unfaithfulsfan]

I put the shop drive back in with the bezel off and the keyboard pulled away from over the cpu and fan. Just completed clean install of Windows but it did shut down on me once when I forgot to flip over the keyboard after typing in a user name.

Don't know WTF I'm supposed to tell the customer. "Sorry dude, your laptop just suddenly effed itself. Works great as long as you don't attach the keyboard. What can I say, go buy a new one. BTW you owe me $127 for finding that out for you."

I really hate my life sometimes. On top of that, I've got another mystery with a Dell Dimension 2350 on the way back in for a rework. I've already done TWO clean installs to correct a flashing desktop problem Windows explorer keeps starting and stopping starting and stopping starting and stopping.

First install, he was fine till he installed Publisher then boom there it went. I did another install and he lasted 4 days till he had to install Acrobat Reader then it farged up again.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhh!!!!


Jack